Category Archives: music

It’s kind of like that Mark Fisher quote where he’s like, “It’s almost easier to imagine death than life post-capitalism.” Something like that. If you can’t hear the present and you can’t hear the future, how can you imagine anything other than what you’ve had in the past. I think music plays a really big part in creating a vision or momentum towards human development. Maybe that’s really idealistic, but…

-Holly Herndon

Our background as television viewers has conditioned us to expect that things on screens change dramatically and in a significant temporal sequence, and has therefore reinforced a rigid relationship between viewer and screen – you sit still and it moves. I am interested in a type of work which does not necessarily suggest this relationship: a more steady-state image-based work which one can look at and walk away from as one would a painting: it sits still and you move.

BRIAN ENO, 1984

“All sound is the invisible in the form of a piercer of envelopes. Whether it be bodies, rooms, apartments, castles, fortified cities. Immaterial, it breaks all barriers. . . . Hearing is not like seeing. What is seen can be abolished by the eyelids, can be stopped by partitions or curtains, can be rendered immediately inaccessible by walls. What is heard knows neither eyelids, nor partitions, neither curtains, nor walls. . . . Sound rushes in. It violates.

Lily Hirsch’s “Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment” (Michigan) explores how divergences in taste can be exploited for purposes of social control. In 1985, the managers of a number of 7-Eleven stores in British Columbia began playing classical and easy-listening music in their parking lots to drive away loitering teen-agers. The idea was that young people would find such a soundtrack insufferably uncool. The 7-Eleven company then applied this practice across North America, and it soon spread to other commercial spaces. To the chagrin of many classical-music fans, especially the lonely younger ones, it seems to work. This is an inversion of the concept of Muzak, which was invented to give a pleasant sonic veneer to public settings. Here instrumental music becomes a repellent.”

‘…here’s a sound that I can’t hear. It’s a high-frequency, around 17.4 kHz. I can’t hear it because that frequency of sound (and anything above it) is typically only audible to people under 25. It’s the result of a phenomenon called presbycusis, a term used for this progressive, age-related form of hearing loss.

In 2005, Howard Stapleton adopted this frequency for an invention he called The Mosquito, an ultrasonic alarm designed to “disperse unwanted youth gatherings” and “combat vandalism,” as the company puts it. Because the sound is only audible to those under 25, UK business owners — including even McDonald’s — can flick on The Mosquito alarm to repel potential vandals while retaining the patronage of the 25+ crowd who can’t hear it. Adults are sneaky fucks.’

Andrew Feenberg writes that “human beings can only act on a system to which they themselves belong. This is the practical consequence of being an embodied being. Every one of our interventions returns to us in some form as a feedback from our objects.”

http://erstwords.blogspot.com/2009/07/field-recording-and-experimental-music.html?m=1

“Maguchi Bay is a very ordinary fishing bay in Japan, a quiet place,” he recounts. “But the place was mysterious for me. There are many piers and breakwaters at the bay. When a contact mic is attached to one of the smallest and oldest piers, a huge amplitude of very low frequency sound is spread there. It was an unusual case in my field work. I discovered the low frequency about ten years ago. The mysterious thing for me is that this low-frequency vibration doesn’t relate to any sound that one hears in the air. First, I thought that it was the effect of the wind shaking the pier. But then it happened when there was no wind. Then, I thought that the sound was the vibration of a distant ship resonating across the bay, bouncing off the hill and making itself felt under water in the bay. But this guess was wrong too, as it would have been possible to detect the sound with the air microphone. It was so mysterious.

“My next guess was that there was a cause at the bottom of the sea,” he continues. “So I asked a fisherman who lives there. His answer was that the seabed terrain was extremely rugged. The water currents at the bottom of the sea are terrible. So the low frequencies came from the seabed. It was the vibration of the underwater currents hitting the pier supports where they met the seabed. The low frequency that I observed is an essential feature of Maguchi Bay and it’s directly related to the structure of that place. It only became a fishing bay when a lot of breakwaters were built to calm down the terrible sea currents. So there is a local history that I became aware of through the low frequency. I came to love the place, which I’ve known since I was a child, more than before. This is an ideal example of my field work.”